


ruina necessaria est

by DeanWinchesterIsTrans



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Jankey Time concepts, Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 15:18:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12938040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeanWinchesterIsTrans/pseuds/DeanWinchesterIsTrans
Summary: The Doctor saved Gallifrey, but there was more to the War than just one planet.





	ruina necessaria est

**Author's Note:**

> Hi so the 50th anniversary “psych he didn’t commit genocide” is bugging me cause taking away Gallifrey is all wooo he saved his people but like ???? the Time War isn’t strictly Time Lords vs. Daleks  
> it’s Daleks vs. the rest of the universe and the Time Lords just happened to get in the way/throw the first stone so to speak  
> plus the ships surrounding Gallifrey? that isn’t gonna be the only forces the Daleks have cause they ain’t stupid  
> Arcadia was one battle. get rid of everyone there then it’s a lot of ppl dead but the war wouldn’t end it would just get the Time Lords out of the way  
> the Time War was made out to be a lot more complicated of a thing than just “whoops let’s remove Gallifrey hooray it’s a happy ending and we never have to address the scary shit 10 said ever again” (Nightmare Child, y’all, Nightmare Child, I wanna know more!!)  
> also jankey Time terms  
> pls excuse my crap grammar in this note I swear I have decent grammar in the actual fic
> 
> Also! A lot of this was inspired by Time v.3.0 by Teyke which isn’t up to date with the 50th anniversary stuff but that doesn’t matter because it’s so /good/ I’ve read and reread it like 5 times please go read their fic

The new man stepped out of his TARDIS, his hearts light for once at the thought of his people being alive somewhere out there.

They promptly sank again at the sight of the old barn. The new man’s old eyes scanned the room, lighting on the Moment.

“What?” he asked, his new voice unfamiliar to him. “But I was on Earth. I had just left that art museum. Why am I back on Gallifrey?”

“We’re not on Gallifrey, dear,” a woman with dark hair, ice blue eyes, and a Scottish accent said.

“But this is the barn, isn’t it? On Gallifrey?” the new Doctor, the Ninth, said, questioning both their location and the Moment’s ability to identify locations correctly. Maybe weapons of mass destruction didn’t come with GPS.

“A simulacrum,” she said, shrugging and offering no further explanation. “I like it.”

“Let me guess, you’re another someone from my future?” the Doctor with fed up resignation he felt down in his bones.

“And your past,” she said with an attempt at an air of mystery that he promptly ignored.

“Why am I here?” he asked bluntly. “I thought I was finished.”

“Saving Gallifrey didn’t end the War,” the woman said, and the Doctor’s hearts skipped a beat or two. He hadn’t even considered... “That task is up to you now.”

“But the Dalek ships were shot down!” he protested.

“The whole universe is affected by this war,” the woman reminded him. “A large part of the universe has already been affected, and that time lock can’t hold forever. You need to activate the Moment,” she begged.

“I’m not— I can’t,” the Doctor stammered.

“Yes, you can. Or rather, I can. All you have to do is press the button, my dear Doctor,” the woman said, and he walked forward to the Moment against his better judgement.

“I thought I ended it,” he said, more to himself than to the conscious machine. “I thought I could be the Doctor again.”

“Gallifrey is just one life saved. There’s still the rest of the Dalek armada out there. There’s still their allies, and the allies of the Time Lords. This section of the universe is dying, Doctor,” the woman said, begging. “Doctors save as many as they can, but sometimes they need to know when to help a person die painlessly.”

“You’re asking me to kill billions of species, eradicate trillions of cultures,” the Doctor rephrased her words, nearly breathless. “What makes me any different from the Daleks if I do this?”

“You do it out of mercy,” the machine taking on the appearance of a woman he should know said.

“Will it be painless?” he asked, his hand hovering over the button.

“No.”

He didn’t need to know if she meant he would hurt, or the worlds he was about to burn would, but he knew what must be done.

In spite of this knowledge, or perhaps because of it, the Doctor began to cry.

The woman that the Moment took the form of wrapped her arms around him. He noticed that she was crying too.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

“I weep for you, and what you must do,” she said plainly, pulling away. “Be brave, Doctor. Stay strong, and remember to run.”

“But who are you? Your form, I mean,” the Doctor said, maybe stalling, maybe genuinely curious, maybe both.

“You’ll find me soon enough,” the woman said with a bittersweet smile. “The Moment is now, Doctor. Attend your patients.”

The Doctor sighed at the theatrics, and pressed the button.

To those that don’t speak Gallifreyan, there is no single word for this event. There is no truly accurate meaning, yet there is one word that is close. Nevermore.

In English, ‘nevermore’ means ‘at no future time’. As there is the closer English equivalent to the event that the Moment unleashed, this can cause for some misconceptions.

The Time War is nevermore.

The Time War has been erased.

A Gallifreyan’s ‘nevermore’ means something that existed, then didn’t. Something that was removed from the whole of Time and Reality itself, yet remembered, like the Year That Never Was. The Moment burned through space and time. The Daleks never existed, and neither did their allies. Entire civilizations were unmade and erased easily as wind blowing away a footprint.

This would happen later again to the Doctor with Rory. It had already happened to him with the demat guns, both Time Lord made and Dalek.

Normally, this isn’t noticeable. One being here, another being there... It isn’t hard for small bits of time to become nevermore, and subsequently forgotten, but a section of the very fabric of the universe? That turns some heads.

This realization came all at once. Children of Gallifrey once had a way of expressing that too, best translated as ‘omnipresent’. The War became nevermore all at once, therefore its echo became omnipresent, before fading away in a sideways manner.

Yes, time can become sideways. Sideways time is time that does not follow the rules. This time is commonly identified by a time traveler as an event differing from memory, but not due to any misremembered facts. Usually this is either caused by an Event, capital E, or it’s just another time traveler screwing around and altering events, lowercase e.

In the End of the Time War’s case, it was an Event, capitalized. The End of the War was an omnipresent Event, but humanity only advanced enough to be fully aware of it by the fifty-first century. To the humans, it seemed like a massive temporal power had suddenly been removed, and they thrived off of ancient legend of Time Lords and Daleks and a mighty war.

In response to this temporal power vacuum, the humans created the Time Agency, with Time Agents to keep track of all anomalies. This worked with marginal success.

The Agency closed down after a few years, and by the very end of it, if one were to go back to the founding of the Time Agency, there were no more stories of wars and Time Lords and Daleks, there was only a shrug and a “it seems like a good idea to me.”

That is how time goes sideways, and it broke the Doctor’s hearts to watch happen. He watched his people’s memory fade out from the universe like a colorful fabric bleached out in the sun, eventually only held by him and those he passed his story on to. He became the sole representative of an assumed-nevermore race.

“It doesn’t make sense though, strategically,” the Tenth said to the Eleventh, after the One of War had left.

“It does mathematically,” the Eleventh said, “Our calculations were correct.”

“No, I mean, removing Gallifrey wouldn’t have worked in stopping the War, would it?” the Tenth speculated. “That was just one battle, just one planet even if it was the home world of the Time Lords. The Daleks had more than those ships in their armada, too. Removing Gallifrey wouldn’t have saved all the other planets in the Time Lock. The remaining Dalek forces would decimate them all.”

“And I thought he was the life and soul,” Clara remarked sarcastically.

Distracted, the Eleventh replied, “He’s got a point.”

“What really happened after Gallifrey was saved?” the Tenth asked to himself, both in a speculative manner and in asking his future standing before him.

“Is the War still burning behind the Time Lock then?” the Eleventh replied.

“Did we win the battle but lose the war?” the Tenth asked, absentmindedly, no, anxiously tracing circles onto the bench.

“At least there’s still something we don’t know, right?” the Eleventh said, trying to point out the bright side to things.

“Yeah, there is that,” the Tenth said, his questions still unresolved. For a spark of a moment, he remembered a not-yet-familiar woman telling him to run. Sure, he could do that.

**Author's Note:**

> In case it wasn’t obvious the Moment was acting as Missy.  
> so I have this headcanon that Time Lords have a lot more complex of a language when it comes to expressing time like  
> fluid/fixed? got a way to express that  
> nevermore? got it  
> omnipresent? yep  
> past/present/future? duh  
> possibility? yeah  
> past incarnation/ current/ future/ unknown /all? hell yeah
> 
> I also like to think that they have a way of expressing paradoxes and that originally it was for technical terms  
> and then it went to become hypotheticals maybe?  
> (also probably used by politicians a lot in speeches cough cough RASSILON cough kind of like 1984’s doublespeak??? like “I mean this and that” “which one? what are ur policies?” [turns away dramatically and walks offstage amid thunderous applause])  
> and then colloquially it became a way of expressing sarcasm? and in the Time War it became used as technical again so I’m just picturing the master and the doctor working together like  
> “we should do this”  
> “I can’t tell if you’re genuinely suggesting using a paradox or being a sarcastic little shit right now”  
> “fuck you”  
> “that still doesn’t answer my question”
> 
>  
> 
> aaaaanyways if y’all have any personal headcanons abt Gallifreyan stuff and/or time please share!! I hope I explained the time junk decently


End file.
